26. Deleted Scenes - Birdseed Shirt (What Delicate Recordings)

One of the benefits of covering local live music the last 3 years is that I end up hearing a lot of great bands from all over that happened to play in Baltimore the same night I was seeing a local band. And that really started to pay off this year when a lot of those bands released good studio albums, among them Deleted Scenes from Washington, D.C., who I’ve ended up seeing live a bunch of times because they play with Baltimore bands so often. And I was pleasantly surprised when their full-length debut got a nice big rave review from Pitchfork, and not surprised at all when I ended up loving the album myself, which is kind of a standard issue 2009 indie rock album but has too many great songs (“Fake IDs,” “Ithaca,” “Mortal Sin”) for me to possibly front on.



27. The Alchemist - Chemical Warfare (ALC Records/E1 Music)

With producer albums and too-many-cooks posse cuts more commonplace than ever, it takes an actual great producer with a strong sense of his own sound and what rappers work best with it to make an actual good album out of such a slapdash formula. And while this is still scattershot by nature, it’s still a pretty solid listen that features one of my favorite songs of the year (“That’ll Work” with Juvenile and Three 6 Mafia) and one of the only decent verses Eminem dropped this year.



28. Superchunk - Leaves In The Gutter EP (Merge Records)

Touchstone indie bands usually have to stay away and broken up for a good long while to reap the rewards of big reunion tours and fawning press. Superchunk will never experience that, both because they never officially broke up, and because they never let much time pass without some archival live release or compilation or an occasional show. Still, this little EP was the closest thing they came to a new album in almost 8 years, and as much of a little morsel it was, with four songs and a demo (and “Misfits and Mistakes” was already released in 2007, and I saw them play “Knock Knock Knock” at a show way back in 2003), it was still, along with the “Crossed Wires” 7” a few months later, a slight return I was extremely grateful for. If they just keep trickling out EPs and singles for a few years without ever dropping a heavily hyped comeback album, I’d be just fine with that.



29. Two Tongues - Two Tongues (Vagrant Records)

This album feels a lot less significant to me than it probably would if it didn’t come out the same year that Max Bemis’s main band, Say Anything, made a much better album, but I still played the hell out of “Silly Game.”



30. Young Jeezy - Trappin’ Ain’t Dead (DJ Folk)

‘09 was mainly an off year for Jeezy, in which he made videos for every other song from The Recession, upstaged Jay on his own album, reignited and then backed off from the stupid old Gucci Mane beef, and appeared on the worst singles ever released by Kanye, Rihanna and DJ Khaled. But somewhere in there, he also made his best mixtape since Trap Or Die.



31. The Bird And The Bee - Ray Guns Are Not Just The Future (Blue Note Records)

Inara George is someone who initially interested me for all of her associations with people I like (she’s in a group with Eleni Mandell, is the daughter of Lowell George of Little Feat, and is married to the guy who directed Zero Effect and Walk Hard). But this year I was charmed by her own work on this coy little electronic-tinged indie pop album, which features a strangely affecting ode to David Lee Roth called “Diamond Dave.”



32. Elvis Costello - Secret, Profane & Sugarcane (Hear Music/Universal Records)

One tends to think of Elvis Costello’s huge and rapidly expanding discography as always bouncing between extremes, from one genre to another. So it was interesting to realize this year that if you look past the classical album, the live album, the Allen Toussaint album, and so on, the last 3 albums of new songs that he’s released all mark sort of a natural progression in one direction, with the roots rock of 2004’s The Delivery Man and last year’s Momofuku kind of leading the way toward the acoustic Secret, Profane & Sugarcane. I’m not always the biggest fan of Elvis in this particular mode -- King Of America may be his most overrated album, if you ask me -- but here it all comes out very relaxed and comfortable in a way that his ‘genre’ albums rarely are.



33. The Mean - Meet Us Here (self-released)

Another great band that I kind of stumbled upon one night when they were passing through Baltimore is Philadelphia’s The Mean, a six-piece band with three singer/guitarists, each with his own distinct voice and songwriting style, who finally got around to capturing the songs from their great live show on record.



34. Ryan Leslie - Ryan Leslie (NextSelection/Casablanca/Universal Records)

Ideally, a cobbled together collection of the best of the two albums R-Les released this year would be better than either. But if I have to choose, I’ll take the self-titled debut over Transition.



35. Heartless Bastards - The Mountain (Fat Possum Records)

I checked out this album solely on the strength of Tom Breihan comparing them to the Geraldine Fibbers, which in my book is always high praise. And while they don’t totally live up to my unrealistic expectations based on that comparison, I am enjoying this record more and more on its own terms. I think I like this more in spite of Erika Wennerstrom’s vocals than because of them, though, there’s something kind of forced and deliberately old-timey about her delivery that reminds me of, like, Chrisette Michele.



36. Evangelista - Prince Of Truth (Constellation Records)

Speaking of the Fibbers, Carla Bozulich released the third album from her Evangelista project this year. And while I can’t help but think of it as a disappointment compared to Hello, Voyager, which was in my top 10 last year, everything Carla does has some worth to me, and “You Are A Jaguar” is pretty killer.



37. Freeway - The Calm Before The Storm (Benja Styles)

I’m still sorting through Freeway’s prolific 2009 output, and I’m not totally sure what my favorite of the four albums and mixtapes he released in the last 9 months really is. But at the moment I’m going with this mixtape he released in October, which has this relentless momentum and just keeps going banger after banger, kicking off with the incredible doubletime flow “When I Rap.”



38. Pearl Jam - Backspacer (Monkeywrench Records)

Although I was initially bummed that this album doesn’t totally live up to how good the lead single, “The Fixer,” is, I’ve really started to warm up to it, particularly after their appearance on “Austin City Limits.” It being 20 minutes shorter than Riot Act really makes it easier to forgive Backspacer’s comparable shortcomings, too.



39. Prince / Bria Valente - LOtUSFLOW3r / MPLSoUND / Elixer ( Records)

6 months before Pearl Jam, Prince also made me drive out to Target for the purpose of buying an album. And while a triple CD only stands to make a mockery out of the hit-to-miss ratio Prince has been on the wrong side of for decades now, I have to say that there’s plenty to enjoy on here, particularly on MPLSoUND, which is the drum machine and helium vox concession that the ‘80s Prince fans have been begging for for years but didn’t seem to appreciate much once they got it. The Valente album, far from the dead weight many critics made it out to be (or assumed without even giving it a fair shake), featured my favorite song out of the whole set, “Another Boy.”



40. Brendan Benson - My Old, Familiar Friend (ATO Records)

I was thinking that nothing from this album had wormed into my subconscious like a lot of songs from his first three solo records (or the two Raconteurs albums), but my iTunes play count on “Poised And Ready” doesn’t lie.



41. Rhymefest - The Manual (Scram Jones)

In 2009, mainstream hip hop was saturated with Kanye wannabes, soundalikes and cronies, while one of the few rappers in his circle who’s a vastly superior MC quietly put out a mixtape that was better than his debut album, or for that matter Kid Cudi’s album or whatever other bullshit G.O.O.D. Music is getting ready to put out.



42. The Entrance Band - The Entrance Band (Ecstatic Peace!/Universal Records)

A heavy blast of the kind of retro psychedelia that I usually don’t have much time for, and probably wouldn’t have picked up if they hadn’t blown me away opening for Sonic Youth over the summer, a couple months before releasing their album on Thurston’s vanity label.



43. The Disciplines - Smoking Kills (Second Motion Records)

Although I’m forever willing to argue that The Posies were a far more interesting band than their power pop also-ran status would suggest, Ken Stringfellow did most of his eclectic branching out in his solo career, from intimate lo-fi on 1997’s This Sounds Like Goodbye to twangy country rock and blue-eyed soul on 2001’s Touched, to piano balladry on 2004’s Soft Commands or Afropop on 2006’s EP with WaFlash. In light of all that, his decision to team up with a band full of Norwegians for a stripped-down garage rock record seems almost regressive, but then it’s not even as tuneful as the Posies at their rawest. Still, Stringfellow is one of my favorite songwriters out there, and he gets out a couple good tracks here and there.



44. Gucci Mane - The Cold War: Guccimerica (DJ Drama)

The Cold War series was a big weird gambit that didn’t seem to pay off for Gucci’s career in any concrete way, other than inspiring a bunch of hipster remixes, but one of these three short little EP-length mixtapes ended up being one of my favorite things he released this year.



45. Daniel Francis Doyle - We Bet Our Money On You (We Shot JR)

Doyle is a guy from Texas who does this weird stage show where he records guitar loops, then plays drums and sings to them with a headset, and it all comes together amazingly well. The trick isn’t as impressive on record without a visual element, but it’s still a pretty engangly idiosyncratic sound.



46. Fishboy - Nom (Happy Happy Birthday To Me Records)

More Texas weirdos that I spotted on tour in Baltimore a couple years ago, when they were playing a crazy rock opera called Albatross: How We Failed to Save the Lone Star State with the Power of Rock and Roll. This follow-up is shorter and less ambitious, but still captures some of what I found so charming about his band live.



47. Fabolous - Loso’s Way (Def Jam Records)

Let me see if I can get this straight: Rick Ross makes a generic but efficient identikit Def Jam album with R&B singers on half the songs, and gets a bunch of “masterpiece!” and “album of the year!” raves, but when Fab does the same thing a few months later all anyone does is gripe. It’s because Fab is actually a good rapper and people expect better from him, right? Not that they should, but if anyone’s going to shit out a cookie cutter R&B rap album, I’m gonna listen to the one with some good rhymes.



48. Lil Boosie - Thug Passion (no label)

Boosie’s ‘08 mixtape Da Beginning was probably the one record I most regret not putting on my year-end list last year, and while Thug Passion isn’t quite as essential as that or the retail album he also released this year, I don’t wanna make the same mistake twice.



49. They Might Be Giants - Here Comes Science (Idlewild/Walt Disney)

Likewise, this is in part a corrective for the fact that Here Come The 123s should have been on my ‘08 list.



50. Meat Puppets - Sewn Together (Megaforce Records)

I’m not really that sure how much better this is than Rise To Your Knees, but as I said in regards to the Pearl Jam album, it really benefits from being 20 minutes shorter than its predecessor.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 29, 2009 at 4:58 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.